Janelle Bassett
The Bone Arc
On the porch swing, when the storm is finished but not over, my daughter Joan tells me that snakes are forced to die with their eyes open. “Because they have no eyelids, so really they are forced to do everything with their eyes open,” she adds, but I like the line better without the explanation. This is typical for me, to prefer the allure of the cropped fact.
Joan and I are monitoring the puddles, looking for signs that the rain has stopped completely, but the puddles are still full of round plonks, which look like snake eyes taking in the scenery as they fade into it.
I already had death on my mind, where it should be. Last night I read that in .atalh.yük (a city built over nine thousand years ago in what would become Turkey) people slept directly above their buried ancestors. This is the kind of new knowledge that sticks with you through the night, and now, in the daylight, death is taunting me with wet winks.
Joan observes me, like always, to see if I am the version of her mama that talks and smiles and really hears or the far-away version who falls into puddle trances and only weakly nods in response to questions. She is so beautiful (then, again, now, always) which I am not supposed to say or to care about. I expected the boundless love I have for my children, but I didn’t expect to be so taken with their faces. When they were babies, we would gaze at each other, eyes forced open by awe, but now it’s more of a one-way infatuation. I want to put their faces inside lockets next to my heart and they want my face to make them a cheese quesadilla, pronto.
Both my daughters are more lovely than I have ever been, but I go ahead and take credit for their loveliness. I think, somehow, my good eye pictured their faces and then my 3D-printer uterus made the shape I had in mind. I recently said to Joan, “You know how you feel when you look outside at the trees and the birds and the morning sunshine? That’s how I feel when I look at your face.” The lameness of using cheesy pick-up lines on my own child was tempered slightly by how much I meant it.
When I read about the people who rested on the bones of their grandparents, I thought “Well, don’t we all, really?” But right now, admiring Joan’s lips, I wish I had the gall to literally sleep on top of my buried ancestors. I’d love the continuity of it, the bone arc. I gaze lovingly at my children, the next generation, so why shouldn’t I look backward in the same way?
Because I’m too easily icked by corpses and because I need to pretend I’ll always carry on above ground, that’s why. Still, I’d like to be able to say, “When I sleep, my spine is aligned with the spines of my ancestors.”
Joan hops off the swing and says she wants to stand on the porch steps, even though we saw lightning only minutes before. I say no, which she expected. She whines, which I expected. “Fine,” I tell her, “but if you get zapped I’ll miss you forever.” She weighs this, runs down the first step, then comes right back to me.
My older daughter Edith is inside reading. She’s taken to reading on our carpeted stairs, right in the way. (I feel like we hang out in the stairwell and the hallway more than an average family, but I have no data to support this.) I think about how excited Edith is that she and I are both reading books about lost cities. Hers is a fantasy series, which she likes because a girl is the main character instead of only the sidekick with the best ideas. One of the cities featured in my book, Four Lost Cities by Annalee Newitz, is only minutes away from my home in St. Louis. My husband, daughters and I visited Cahokia for the first time a few weeks ago, listening to a history podcast about the lost mound city on our short drive. It was not a podcast for children, but luckily the hosts breezed over the human sacrifices and focused mainly on the baskets and baskets of mud required to build a hill, on the arm strain of it all.
When we got to Cahokia, Joan wanted to be carried because she had scraped her leg that morning in a scooter wreck. The scrape did not actually affect the structural integrity of her leg, but she was still feeling tender about using it. Even though she’s nearly half my weight, I carried her from the parking lot to a section of reconstructed palisade. The informational sign near the tall logs included a reminder for visitors to be respectful, that Cahokia was a sacred site. I felt that I was being respectful but I was suspicious that others around me weren’t, which is typical for me. My critical vigilance has ruined many a sacred site.
My husband carried Joan toward the tallest structure, Monks Mound, but thankfully she decided she would be able to climb the steps herself. Monks Mound was most likely home to leaders and rulers, who may or may not have considered themselves descendants of the sun and therefore, perhaps, worthy of the highest spot. We can’t say with certainty what the people of Cahokia believed and felt one thousand years ago, but I am certain that I saw some guy using the mound’s massive staircase for an up-and-down cardio workout—and while he may have been a perfectly nice person—I was not sure he was being respectful.
There’s a Pompeii section in my book too, but I haven’t made it there yet. I read the ending first, the Cahokia chapter, since it hits close to home. Then .atalh.yük, a city too ancient for me to fathom, because BCE is lost on me. Earlier this summer, at the library, I picked up a children’s book about Pompeii while Edith and Joan chose the books they wanted to check out. I learned about a young girl, maybe ten or twelve, whose remains were found with a family. She was clutching a smaller boy—probably spent her final moments shushing the little one and pulling him into her chest so he wasn’t forced to see what was coming. Researchers believe that the girl was not a beloved big sister or eldest daughter in the family, but rather a slave. Her teeth showed signs of malnutrition in infancy and the bones of her arms revealed that she carried loads much too heavy for her body. I can’t stop thinking about this girl (then, in the library, and now, as Joan smoothes her ponytail’s flyaways back down), how she held the child in arms that were already spent, if anyone ever had a particular feeling about the lines of her profile, how she’s no one’s ancestor.
Joan can tell I am mentally elsewhere, that I am once again trying to solve a puzzle I have no business solving, that I am looking for meaning and connection instead of being connected and making meaning. But, look, I think I came close this time, because the snakes and the girl in Pompeii saw what was coming and the Cahokia Mounds and my daughters’ cheeks were made to get closer to the sun. Everyone’s arms were sore the next day and the ancestors want, I think, to be slept on. At least I will.